Kant on Empirical and Transcendental Functions of Memory

Authors

  • Hector Luis Pacheco Acosta Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona

Keywords:

Kant, memory, cognition, experience, synthesis

Abstract

This paper analyses the features of Kant’s view of memory, which Kant himself described explicitly in his lectures on anthropology and implicitly in the A edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. I shall offer a review of literature on Kant’s view of memory up to this day. I suggest that memory is a cognitive faculty that has the power to store and reproduce representations. Kant distinguishes among three different kinds of memorization which are relevant for human cognition. I offer reasons to hold that imagination and memory must be differentiated by their functioning, although the first one grounds the second one. Finally, I hold that certain functions of memory need to be presupposed at a transcendental level, in which memory would play a fundamental function with regard to the possibility of experience.


References

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Published

2019-09-10

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No. 32 (2020): January-june

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